All Posts Tagged With: "central banking"
Was Money Really Easy Under Greenspan?
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has become everyone’s favorite scapegoat. His policies allegedly caused, or at least contributed to, the current financial crisis. He is attacked from the left for lax financial regulation, from the right for loose monetary policy, and from the middle for both. Yet two years ago, on leaving office, Greenspan [...]
2Mar2009 | and David R. Henderson | 7 comments | ContinuedPoker and the Free Market
Good poker players are like entrepreneurs: You need greater skill than average to anticipate the future. As Mises so cogently puts it in Human Action, “What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future. He sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way.”
20Jan2009 | Robert Stewart | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Subprime Crisis Shows that Government Intervenes Too Little in Financial Markets?
Start with two assumptions. No. 1: banking and financial markets are inherently unstable. No. 2: government intervention into banking and financial markets can only stabilize (never destabilize). You’ll find it easy to conclude that any period of market instability we experience, like the recent subprime-lending problem, is the market’s fault and that it could have [...]
1Oct2008 | Lawrence H. White | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Recurring Crisis
Recently the governor of the Bank of England announced that the “nice” times had come to an end. (In the Bank’s lexicon, NICE = “Non-Inflationary Constant Expansion”). This news will not come as any shock to the many Americans who have had their homes repossessed recently, but it does appear to have startled many of [...]
1Jul2008 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Current Economic Crisis and the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle
Richard Ebeling is completing his tenure as the president of FEE. This fall he will teach economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. The current financial crisis emerged out of an economic boom that began in 2003 and saw rising stock values, increasing home prices, and high levels of employment and production. The upturn followed [...]
1Jun2008 | Richard M. Ebeling | 4 comments | ContinuedSubprime Monetary Policy
In recent years monetary policy has been conducted so as to create an expectation that the Federal Reserve will bail out investors when asset bubbles deflate. Investors have come to bank on the Fed’s backing of risky ventures. The recent crisis in the subprime mortgage market is at least partly the outcome of this new [...]
1Nov2007 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Euro versus Currency Competition
It is now four years since the euro was introduced as a circulating currency in parts of the European Union. Both Europeans and others are becoming increasingly used to a single money in much of the continent. If the euro remains in use for another five or ten years people may well look back at [...]
1Jan2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedMonetary-Policy Disasters of the Twentieth Century
Kirby R. Cundiff is an associate professor of finance at Northeastern State University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an adjunct associate professor of finance at the University of Maryland University College. The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 and soon did what central banks almost always do: it started printing lots of money. During World [...]
1Jan2007 | Kirby R. Cundiff | 5 comments | ContinuedFrom the Armistice to the Great Depression
When the Armistice took effect on November 11, 1918, bringing World War I to a close, the belligerent nations of Europe were economically almost prostrate—their labor forces and capital stocks depleted greatly, their domestic economic structures distorted grotesquely, and their old arrangements for international trade and investment shattered. To make matters worse, the Versailles Treaty, [...]
1Dec2006 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedEye on the Ball
Like clockwork, on Aug. 28 the New York Times produced another page-one story purporting to show that living standards for many Americans have fallen, this time because wages in recent years have failed to keep up with inflation. This has been happening despite rising productivity and even taking into account the shift from cash to [...]
1Nov2006 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Greenspan Fed in Perspective
Some readers of the Wall Street Journal might have been led to believe that Alan Greenspan had somehow followed Milton Friedman’s monetary rule. We now see, though, that there was no well-grounded rule; there was no standard.
1Jun2006 | Roger W. Garrison | 1 comment | ContinuedWhy Not Monetary Freedom?
In all of the commentaries that have appeared since President George W. Bush nominated Dr. Ben S. Bernanke as Alan Greenspan
1Dec2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedGovernment, Fiscal Responsibility, and Free Banking
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. This paper was delivered at a conference on “One Hundred Years of Dollarization, or a Century without a Central Bank: The Case of Panama,” sponsored by Fundación Libertad in Panama City, Panama, on November 12, 2004. There has been no greater threat to life, liberty, and property throughout [...]
1Feb2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great Chinese Inflation
Inflations have undermined the cultural and economic fabric of society, bringing social chaos and revolution. One example is the Great Chinese Inflation of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, the destruction of the Chinese monetary system during this period helped Mao Zedong’s communist movement triumph on the Chinese mainland in 1949. In the nineteenth and early [...]
1Dec2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 4 comments | ContinuedInterest Rates and the Federal Reserve
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. His latest book is Austrian Economics and the Political Economy of Freedom (Elgar). On June 30, 2004, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee announced it was raising the targeted federal funds interest rate from 1 to 1.25 percent, to begin to prevent a possible future price inflation. The [...]
1Sep2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | ContinuedNinety Years of Monetary Central Planning in the United States
Ninety years ago this month, on December 23, 1913, the Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, establishing a national central-banking system in the United States. The governing board of the Federal Reserve was organized on August 12, 1914, and the Federal Reserve banks opened for operation on November 16, 1914. On the surface, the preamble [...]
1Dec2003 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Fed: The Inside Story of How the World’s Most Powerful Financial Institution Drives the Markets
Reviewed by Larry Schweikart Martin Mayer has been writing books on banking for years, and never lacks for a publisher. His books tend to ramble, however, and this one is no exception. Worse, they tend to reinforce erroneous notions about the supposed need for government intervention in financial markets and institutions. Mayer begins with a [...]
1Aug2002 | Martin Mayer | 0 comments | Continued-
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